Our adventures with Go Ape

Outdoor adventure company Go Ape are the UK’s number one forest adventure found in 34 of the UK’s and 16 of the US’s most breathtaking locations. Their mission is to create amazing life experiences and encourage everyone to live life adventurously.

Our challenge

The adventure company were experiencing a significant decline in online sales from their youth market and following some initial discussions realised their existing adventure portfolio was causing confusion in terms of an overall customer journey on and off site, alongside the tone of voice of their brand.

At first, we were approached to evaluate their existing website CMS platform and digital strategy, but our relationship quickly evolved into a far more creative and strategic partnership that would lead to us providing a variety of consultancy services initially, spanning the evaluation of existing quantitative data and market research, the reshaping of their existing product portfolio, their brand in terms of look, feel and tone of voice in relation to appealing to multiple audiences. This led to us providing further UX and wireframe prototyping services and the development of new adventure personas to help create effective customer journeys and improve conversaion rates, as well as providing digital marketing and advertising services to help drive and convert customers.

The Solution

We started by taking everyone in the agency to Go Ape in Aberfoyle to experience the adventure first-hand and to begin immersing the team in the Go Ape brand. This was followed by several workshops with the business founders and the management team which led to some of us experiencing and participating in a further 7 courses throughout the UK to understand the complexity of the product offering and just how different each adventure was, based mainly on the location of each.

What followed included an audit of their existing market research, website user journeys, analytics and wider creative and marketing materials. Our focus spanned user experience, website performance and conversion, brand and tone of voice, analytics and data. We also analysed their digital marketing strategy, previous ansd present campaigns, helping devise a new strategic approach and the delivery of new campaigns including new photogrpahy and video content.

The results

In the first three months of supporting their digital marketing and advertising and providing UX consultancy, we achieved a 469% increase in online revenue compared to the same period the previous year; increasing revenue by hundreds of thousands of pounds.

During this time we introduced some very relevant friends of ours, working in partnership with content and adventure sport specialists Cut Media to produce photography and film content to fit our evolving tone of voice and brand and to appealing more to their declining 18-24 year old market. The video went on to be used as a Cinema ad. We also introduced our friend and Tiso Instagramer Racheal, to help improve the quality and relevancy of photographyand social content.

A key deliverable of our was a our recommendation as to how their brand and adventure portfolio could be adapted to attract more customers and drive more conversions. The Go Ape team have made many of these fundamental changes to their adventure portfolio to make it simpler and easier for audiences to find what’s suitable for them and hacve rebranded a selection of their adventures to reflect the experience, and are working to roll this out online and offline.